RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Empirical underdetermination: A bigger problem for the social sciences?
A1 Caamaño Alegre, Maria
AB The now familiar idea that the detection of an empirical phenomenon isinferred from a complex collection of data (Bogen & Woodward 1988,Woodward 1989, 2000, 2010, McAllister 1997, 2011, Glymour 2000, Harris2003, Massimi 2007, Leonelli 2015, 2019, Bokulich 2020) entails therecognition that not only theories, but also the description of empiricalphenomena is underdetermined by evidence. Empiricalunderdetermination, understood as the underdetermination of empiricalphenomena by data, emerges as a major challenge still to be fullyacknowledged and carefully approached in the philosophy of science.To face this challenge, it is essential to be able to identify the multileveltheoretical assumptions underlying the production of data models andthus the inference to empirical phenomena. Despite the many difficulties,this kind of analysis has already been attempted with some success in thecase of the natural sciences (Kaiser 1991, Leonelli 2009, Karaca 2018,Bokulich & Parker 2021, Antoniou 2021), where background knowledgeabout instruments and empirical procedures is often explicitly available.However, the situation seems quite different in the case of the socialsciences, where the opacity of instruments (Borsboom et al. 2009) and thehighly conjectural nature of background assumptions, renders thechallenge of empirical underdetermination more dramatic.
PB College Publications
YR 2026
FD 2026
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/82640
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/82640
LA eng
NO María Caamaño Alegre (2025) “Empirical underdetermination: A bigger problem for the social sciences?” (forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology, College Publications).
DS UVaDOC
RD 07-feb-2026